This Explains A Lot

Prominent members of conservative, Washington-based defense think tanks were given permanent office space at [Petraeus's] headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.

Is this new news? It’s the first I’ve heard about it. Who are these prominent think tank members, and who funds their think tanks? Is there a reasonable explanation for this, one that would also justify allowing prominent members of liberal think tanks to have similar privileges? I can’t think of any. Help me out here.

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14 Responses to This Explains A Lot

Rod, it’s easy to guess who those Think Tank people were. The usual suspects from Neocon Inc.

Ironically, there is no meaningful rational counter to Military Exceptionalism on the Left. They have been coöpted by the Obama presidency which validates the permanent American Empire Model as a universally accepted paradigm. In that context, Liberals in the field would report the same worshipful feedback.

“Think tank” comprises a large number of different things, and it’s not wrong for this to go on, so much as it provides a loophole for ideological representatives to embed themselves in the military.

If I’m a non-profit military contractor, like a DARPA-funded engineering laboratory, wouldn’t it make sense for the employees to be on the base sometimes to run tests on some of the equipment or oversee the installation of new systems? Sure. If I’m an expert on military issues in Afghanistan working at RAND, and I have a contract to collaborate with the military and do research for them, wouldn’t it make sense for me to give a seminar on the base? Sure.

So from there it’s a slippery slope to neo-con think-tanks seeing a loophole they can exploit that allows them to have close access to the military in Afghanistan, putting themselves in a position of great influence.

“Is this new news? It’s the first I’ve heard about it. Who are these prominent think tank members, and who funds their think tanks?” — Mr. Dreher

Pssst … Based on hush-hush information my spook operatives have gleaned from an intercepted Those Other Petraeus Emails, at an equally prominent website … the identity of which site I shall not disclose, because frankly I’m incorruptible … the prominent think-tankers are Eli Wiesel and his wife. E-mail material clearly establishes that they had the rambuctiously surging general at their mercy.

“They provided advice to field commanders…” What?? Professional ideologues were giving out military advice during a shooting war, and trained commanders were supposed to take it? I hope we hear more about this.

It’s called “the collapse of civil society” and the vitiation of all the features attendant to a functioning one: division of labor (which requires a stable, viable currency), adherence to some form of transcendental moral belief system, and leaders who are something more than festooned figureheads pushed to the fore of hungry anxious mobs via regularly-scheduled plebiscite. And yes, Democrats certainly do it as well as Republicans.

You see the damnedest things in war zones, and especially on the camps, small and large, controlled by U.S. or allied forces. I have enough material from my own two tours for a nice comic book. Maybe even a smallish Manga type volume. I did see people in civilian clothing dispensing military advice, but to my knowledge they were not from a think tank. Just a run-of-the-mill defense contractor that had got ahold of some counter-insurgency practitioners from the UK or Australia or something. There were also plenty of Blackwater types, private defense-contracted security types, as well as civilians from every nationality on the planet doing everything from running the dining halls and kitchens to refueling everybody to conducting intelligence operations to cutting your hair to running extremely dodgy electric through the buildings to cleaning out the port-a-johns. Pay scale varied from $300 a month, check your passport in with your supervisor when you arrive, sure you look 18, more or less, go clean the dishes; to $300,000 a year, half of that tax free if you timed it right. Have I mentioned that at least some of the concrete blast barriers were basically hollow shells with neon pink styrofoam inside? I could go on. You’ll have to wait for the book.